Saturday, February 17, 2018

When they declared "independence" ten years ago, the KLA terrorists no doubt it was a transit stop on their 130-journey towards "Natural Albania." They had forgotten the crucial characteristic of the Atlantic Empire: any deals with it are Faustian in nature.

Ten years later, "Kosovian" independence is stalled, the promised prosperity is nowhere to be found, and instead of supporting Albanian expansionism the Empire is setting up special courts to keep KLA chiefs under control. Nor are "Kosovians" the first or only ones to have their hopes so dashed - but that's another topic, for another time.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

"Once bitten, twice shy" goes the old saying, and Serbs have been bitten a few more times besides. While the Empire is renewing interest in "finishing the job" in the Balkans, Russia is relying on Empire-made Aleksandar Vucic to be the patriot. What could go wrong?

While Moscow treats President Vucic as a credible partner, he reportedly said he was “satisfied” with the Atlantic Council’s proposals and wished they would become official US policy. Having previously conducted an “internal dialogue” with himself on the topic of surrendering the Serbian claim to Kosovo ‒ in the pages of Western-owned newspapers, no less ‒ he now says he’d be happy to hand the issue over to Russia for mediation.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

I meant to post something about the ICTY - or as I have called it over the years, the Hague Inquisition - after they reached the preordained verdict against Ratko Mladić last week, but didn't get a chance to do so before another defendant decided to spite the fake court with a dramatic gesture.

Slobodan Praljak, the former movie director who became a general during the Bosnian War (and "directed" the destruction of Mostar's Old Bridge in 1993), rejected the Inquisition's verdict "with contempt" and drank poison in the courtroom. His gesture prompted me to contemplate the ICTY's existence, practices, and effects:

Rather than promoting reconciliation, by selectively prosecuting Serbs and Croats over killing Muslims (but not each other), the ICTY has nurtured the feeling of righteous victimhood that has prevented Muslims from reaching any sort of viable accommodation with the Christian majority. As a result, 22 years after the Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia is still a gunshot away from another war.

"Wherever they go, these agents of chaos infect the target country’s politics, manipulating genuine local activists into becoming the agents of their people’s demise. While they preach democracy, their dirty tricks are effectively destroying its credibility in the long term. That’s fine with them, however; the objective is not democracy but obedience. Besides, they won’t stick around to see the consequences - there is always the next revolution to plan and execute."

It's not just that having done it once, the Empire proceeded to do it again elsewhere (and whether it succeeded or failed, made the lives of those involved miserable to some degree or another), but that it used these Janissaries to spread its virus far and wide - and calling them Serbs all along, thus adding insult to injury.

In the early morning hours of August 4, 1995, on the heels of an incessant artillery and air bombardment, some 200,000 Croatian troops moved in to “liberate” Krajina - a stretch of mountains inhabited by Serbs who had rejected Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia four years prior. Overrunning the token UN observation posts, the US-trained Croatian army quickly overwhelmed localized Serb resistance. President Franjo Tudjman declared August 5, the day Croat troops entered the Serb capital of Knin, a national holiday: “Homeland Thanksgiving Day.” By August 7, the “Republic of Serb Krajina” was no longer in existence.

Frustrated Dreams

The area of Krajina was for several centuries the borderland between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, a buffer zone that protected the inner Hapsburg lands from Turkish raids. It was populated largely by Orthodox Serbs, who had fled Ottoman persecution, and who became frontiersmen for the Hapsburgs in exchange for land and liberty. By the 19th century, the Ottoman Turks were in retreat; the new danger to the Hapsburg Empire was Slavic nationalism. Vienna turned on its frontiersmen, encouraging conflict between the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, who became its staunchest supporters. Vienna’s Serbophobia eventually led Austria-Hungary into a fatal conflict that destroyed much of European civilization.

It also nurtured the hatred that would explode in 1941 as the vicious Ustasha genocide. These homegrown Croatian Nazis, led by Ante Pavelić, set out to destroy the “race of slaves” (as the founder of Croatianism Ante Starčević put it) with ruthless abandon, but ran out of time. Still, by 1945 they had killed anywhere between half a million and 750,000 Serbs.

With the end of communism in 1990, Franjo Tuđman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) brought a revival of Pavelić’s symbols and vocabulary. Some of the top supporters of the HDZ were Ustasha émigrés. Tuđman himself expressed relief that his wife was “neither Serb nor Jewish.” His constitutional reform redefined the republic as a nation-state of Croats, with Serbs as an ethnic minority. When Tuđman’s government declared independence from the Yugoslav federation in 1991, most Serbs saw 1941 all over again. This, not some imaginary “aggression” from Serbia, was the root of their “rebellion,” and the genesis of the Krajina Republic. After several months of bitter fighting, marked by massacres, ambushes, and the most vitriolic propaganda, the UN brokered an armistice. The so-called Vance Plan envisioned four “protected areas” with a Serb majority, whose eventual status would be resolved through negotiations.

Over the next three years, Tudjman’s government feverishly prepared for war, training its troops on the battlefields of Bosnia and staging quick, limited offensives at the strategic edges of UN-protected areas (most infamous being the Medak Pocket attack in 1993). Although enjoying political, diplomatic, and even military support from Vienna and Berlin since 1991, it was only when it got Washington’s support that Zagreb was ready – and able – to strike. “Retired” American officers, working for government contractor MPRI, claimed to teach Croat officers “democracy” and “human rights.” The events of May and August 1995 would demonstrate MPRI’s definitions of both.

Junkyard Dogs

"Dick: We ‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But it is no time to get squeamish about things."– To End a War, by Richard Holbrooke, Chapter 6

US envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke thus described the note slipped to him by Ambassador Robert Frasure during a meeting with Croatian officials in 1995. Holbrooke’s own account of how the US officially condemned Croatian attacks even as he was meeting with Tudjman and telling him which cities to take, suggests he was hardly “squeamish” about using Croats to fight what he – and hundreds of advocacy journalists, lobbyists, and policymakers – had termed “Serb aggression.”

On May 1, 1995, Croatian troops tested both their readiness and the UN’s will by staging a lightning strike at an exposed Serb enclave of Western Slavonia. The operation was code-named Bljesak – “flash,” or perhaps more appropriately, “Blitz.” The clear violation of the armistice went unpunished. The stage was set for Oluja.

According to Serb documentation, the three-day offensive in August 1995 resulted in the expulsion of 220,000 people. Some 1,943 people have been listed as missing/presumed dead, including 1199 civilians, 523 women, and 12 children. The death toll would have been greater had the Serbs not fled en masse before the advancing Croat tanks; all who stayed behind were killed. The Croats, and their American sponsors, were definitely not squeamish.

Ten years later, Krajina is still a wasteland, with “scattered ghost villages strewn with shell-scarred houses overgrown with ivy and tall grass” (Reuters). Only a tenth of some 400,000 Serbs who lived in Croatia before it seceded have returned, only to face bureaucratic abuse and frequent physical violence. Tuđman made Pavelić’s dream to rid Croatia of Serbs a reality. It seems everything is in the choice of allies.Unpleasant Comparisons

After obliterating Krajina, the conquering Croatian army moved into western Bosnia, aiding the Izetbegovic government to crush a dissident faction led by Fikret Abdic and assisting in the major Muslim offensive that “coincided” with NATO’s massive bombing of Bosnian Serbs. But after the Dayton Agreement was signed and peace imposed on Bosnia, Empire’s junkyard dogs discovered the supply of Milk Bones had run out. They had served their purpose.

Croatia and Albania joined NATO in 2009, ten years after the Alliance launched its first illegal war against what was left of Yugoslavia. Zagreb was admitted to the European Union in 2013 - a year after General Ante Gotovina and several others accused by the Hague Inquisition of war crimes during Oluja were acquitted on appeal in yet another show trial.

Some of the truth about atrocities against the Serbs is slowly coming to light, but interestingly enough, only after the prominent personalities accused have fallen out of political grace. The Zagreb leadership snaps back at any hint that Oluja might have been anything but just, right, and noble. In 2005, when Serbian president Boris Tadić called it an “organized crime,” Croatia's President Stipe Mesić replied it could hardly compare to Serb crimes such as Srebrenica.

But by all means, let’s compare! In both cases, a UN “safe area” was targeted by the attack. In Srebrenica, the UN at least tried to protect Muslim civilians; in Krajina, it did no such thing. Serbs evacuated Muslim noncombatants from Srebrenica; Serbs who did not flee Krajina were killed. Yet Srebrenica is somehow “genocide,” while Oluja is a victory worth a national holiday!

Another reason the Empire prefers to keep Oluja out of sight and out of mind is the push to establish an independent, Albanian-dominated Kosovo. If Croatia’s conquest of Krajina was legitimate, because Krajina’s existence violated its sacrosanct administrative borders, then why did Serbia not have the right to uphold its borders when it came to Kosovo? If obliterating the Serb population did not disqualify Croatia from keeping Krajina and Slavonia, how can the exodus of less than half of Kosovo’s Albanians disqualify Serbia from keeping Kosovo? If the Serbs, a constituent Yugoslav nation, did not have the right to ethnic self-determination in Krajina and Bosnia, how can the Kosovo Albanians (an ethnic minority) have one?

The “Abramowitz Doctrine”

This apparent paradox was “explained” by Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of U.S. foreign policy, in a 2003 interview: “there is no entirely rational answer … you seek perfect reasoning, which does not correspond to reality on the ground.” Logic does not apply to the Empire, because it creates its own reality; where have we heard that before?

The “reality” Abramowitz and his like-minded policymakers have sought to establish by force has been one in which, whatever the circumstances, Serbs are in the wrong. Apologists for the Empire dismiss this observable, verifiable fact as a “conspiracy theory” and claim the Serbs have a “victim complex” – even as their entire Balkans “reality” rests on the claim that everyone else has been victimized by the Serbs.

What “perfect reasoning” is involved in recognizing the simple fact that the centuries-old Serb community in Krajina is practically extinct, and that the Serb community in Kosovo – from which most of their ancestors came – is facing the same prospect?

Where the Nazis failed, the American Empire has succeeded. Is that really something to be thankful for?

(Nota bene, August 2017: Croatia and Albania remain the axis of Empire's dominion over the Balkans today. But the Empire itself is losing its grip on the fake "reality" it created with force and lies, and the East remembers.)

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

I have just found out that the final parts of the documentary series "Kingdom of Yugoslavia in WW2" - which I've mentioned here before - have been finalized and posted, completing the 18-episode project.

According to executive producer Miloslav Samardžić, the trailer for episodes 13-18 has been posted on Vimeo, where the entire 18-episode run is up for purchase or rent.

It took the Kragujevac-based Pogledi and the society of former Royal Yugoslav Army soldiers in the UK nearly four years to crowdfund and produce the series, which shows the previously untold story of the war in Yugoslavia.

The first twelve episodes were offered to the Serbian Radio Television (RTS), which was supposed to reply by the end of May but has yet to do so, Samardžić said.

He says the series shows a much-needed alternate perspective to the movies glorifying the Communist Partisans, which are currently being shown on RTS in re-runs.

"Our story isn't made up," Samardžić said, adding that buying or renting the series on Vimeo will support the producers' new project, a 90-minute documentary "General Draža Mihailović."

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Today is St. Vitus Day (Vidovdan), the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the 1914 Sarajevo tyrannicide, among other things.

Personally, I think more people ought to heed the object lesson that is Austria-Hungary, which used the events of Sarajevo as a pretext for the long-desired war to conquer and crush Serbia - only to self-destruct four years later.